Points to Pay Heed to Before Undertaking QA of a Cloud-Hosted Game

Cloud based gaming has become very popular – both among the publishers/developers and the users – in the recent years. The fact that it can create a console-like experience on your device has made it very popular among computer game enthusiasts. Availability of cloud has also made games more cost competitive – in addition to making game titles easily and widely accessible. And this facet refers to a scenario in which, as a game publisher, if you hire a game tester it’s advisable to make sure that testing/QA expert has the experience and expertise to deal with cloud-based games.

While performing the testing activity, the testers should keep in mind some of the unique features of different types of cloud environments as they can have a bearing on the performance of the respective game title.

What you get as a ‘cloud’

Shared/Public Cloud: This is the most common type of cloud where users aren’t aware of the location of the infrastructure and have limited control over it. In this environment, the games would be shared between multiple customers with low levels of security. Here users might need to wait for their turn as the same infrastructure is being used by thousands of users simultaneously. Shared/public cloud setup is best suited for ‘free-to-use’ games that do not feature complex UI or graphics and pertain to branding or viral marketing.

Private Cloud: This type of cloud environment is dedicated to a particular client and hence the owner doesn’t need to share it with anyone else. Since private clouds are expensive hence this is ideally suited for premium games (requiring some payments to made towards downloading/playing them) where the user bears the cost for an uninterrupted experience.

Hybrid Cloud: This stands somewhere in between the two of the above environments. Here, the game tester has to consider the security aspects of the cloud while testing the game. However, like private clouds they also offer dedicated resources for hosting premium games.

A game publisher can decide on the use and fate of a title based on the above three cloud platforms; and can hire a game tester/QA expert to ensure the success of the title with respect to the environment where it’s to be hosted.

Besides finding bugs and other issues with games, a tester also provides the key information to stakeholders through information artifacts. It is an important process where the results are presented...